4th day at Roca Partida!!

Hi All! April 7, 2015
    4th day at Roca! It speaks for itself!
    The brown shadow beneath the surface caught our attention at the moment of suiting up for the first dive of the morning! As it came up to even shallower water it reveals itself to be a whale shark! We thought oh! Once again whale shark from yesterday, in a hurry we got ready to go we knew it was going to follow us to the rock.
    Around Roca current was flowing from West side which was our point of descend, beautiful crystal clear water, 25.5˚C/78˚F wat temp, schools of Pacific Creolefish moving in a slow motion covering from surface down to 18m/60ft of water, using efficiently our air consumption we minimize the bubble formation so all fish were there with us instead of moving away from our swim through, as we dive deeper searching for hammer heads we look back to our before position a manta comes by the wall, any way in our heads was the image of hammer heads so not too far ahead a congregation of Black Jacks shows up, we know then shark are nearby, just wait and wait, current wasn’t that strong in this area so we could wait, then one hammer head, then two hammer heads then more, we counted up to 20 making circles and swimming a bit sideways on the same area at 40m/130ft deep approx, the almost cero current took back to the wall, we enjoyed the unique formation of Cotton Mouth Jacks all dressing on Black this time to make it even more jaw dropping the whale shark just swims slow over our heads,  we thought she is back, the same one from yesterday, other sharks here and there, Galapagos, silver tips, white tips, not much left from the fish ball of stripe bonitos so sharks are well feed and happy here at Roca, the sea lion made home a rock on the South part of Roca so she was there with us becoming friendlier each time, we respect a lot the sea life so our reward was the return of whale shark in very shallow water, good because we didn’t want to feel alone on the safety stop!
   On our surface interval we had the opportunity to compare picts of whale shark from yesterday and today, guess what!!! The one from today is not the same one from yesterday, they both females, same length, difficult to know where they are coming from, probably the same path with hours difference to find Roca, just amazing!!! By the way our guests decided to name her Dolores!
    A second dive was affected a bit more by the current from West which was good! In our roll back entry we almost hit Dolores whale shark since she was just below the surface, looking at the other side we had the same great view of fish but now accompanied by 3 dolphins, it is breathtaking the amount fish congregation in this area! Finally we found a good number of hammer heads on the South West point of the rock, deep very deep water! 40 to 50 sharks, current brought us back to East side to find and enjoy more of the whale shark and sea lion.
    Our final dive at Roca! We don’t want to leave! Such a great place! Not really thinking about hammer heads since they are in deep water and it was time to take a break from sort of deep dives, lots of lobsters, eels, Moorish idols, long nose butterfly fish, jacks, pacific creolefish, trumpet fish, gorgeous wall! Hard coral in green and brown color! We drifted from West to North point finding East side, nice ride! Even better because we found a dense school of jacks at 18m/60ft of water, now guess whats below them! Of course hammer heads, a big number of then, we followed the school until South area right where the current didn’t let us swim into it! Unfortunately no whale shark this dive, we missed the singing of hump back whales, in 4 days no one single whale around Roca, so we think the season is really coming to an end.
Dive Inst
Daniel Zapata, Solmar V.